Carl Cannon: Drawbacks of a faith-based presidency

At week’s end, polls shows that only 40 percent of Americans believed President Obama was telling the truth when he promised that anyone who liked their health insurance plan could keep it. Fifty percent of those surveyed said they thought the president had “knowingly lied.”

I’m neither an elitist nor a White House apologist, but I’m with the 40 percent on this one. Having covered the White House during the Clinton and George W. Bush years, I’ve seen this movie. A president promises something, it doesn’t happen, and, boom – he’s branded a liar.

The truth is usually more complicated. Still, when a president doesn’t deliver on his promises, however well-intentioned, we learn a great deal about him.

Let’s start with Bush. It was ludicrous, this notion that he “lied” about Saddam Hussein’s supposed weapons of mass destruction. First, saying he lied suggests that most prominent politicians in this country, and the leaders of many other nations, were also lying – even those who opposed the 2003 U.S. invasion. Some of Saddam’s own military commanders thought Iraq had chemical weapons; they carried gas masks into battle.

Most importantly, it defied logic. Do Bush’s critics believe that Bush thought no one would notice when the promised stockpiles of WMD never materialized? Are they saying no one would have asked?

The same principle is at work regarding the Affordable Care Act of 2010. If you believe the president was lying when he made all those promises, you must think him stupid – the very word Obama used himself when asked at Thursday’s news conferences about the discrepancies between his happy rhetoric and the unhappy reality in two areas: the sorry rollout of the health care website and the cancellation notices hitting Americans’ mailboxes.

“I was not informed directly that the website would not be working the way it was supposed to,” he told CBS White House correspondent Major Garrett, “Had I been informed, I wouldn’t be going out saying, boy, this is going to be great. I’m accused of a lot of things, but I don't think I'm stupid enough to go around saying, this is going to be like shopping on Amazon or Travelocity a week before the website opens if I thought that it wasn't going to work.”

That answer sounded right to me. But in his response to the second part of Garrett’s question – and this is really the crux of the matter – the president was less persuasive.

He rambled, taking some 800 words to reply, but the gist of his explanation was that, when he thought about Americans who had health insurance, he scarcely thought about those who purchased their plans on the open market.

“Keep in mind that the individual market accounts for 5 percent of the population,” Obama said. “So when I said you can keep your health care, you know, I'm looking at folks who've got employer-based health care. I'm looking at folks who've got Medicare and Medicaid. That accounts for the vast majority of Americans.”

He’s right, but that 5 percent translates into millions of people. What did he think would happen to them? Two things, he said. First, the president claimed his “working assumption” was that the majority of such policyholders would find better and less-costly insurance plans in the government. For those who didn’t, he said he thought the grandfathering clauses would suffice.

“It didn't,” he conceded. “And …that's on me.”

Shouldering blame is admirable, and one wouldn’t want to discourage it. Yet, this explanation is both wanting and revealing. It’s wanting because it demonstrates only a passing familiarity with the intricacies of an issue Obama always claimed was near to his heart.

Furthermore, the president’s whole approach to this issue, even now, is instructive for a more important reason: his boundless confidence in big government to deliver the goods.

You’d think such enthusiasm would have been tempered by the $600 million health care website that didn’t work. No such luck. Sounding more like a Republican than a Democrat, Obama figuratively scratched his head Thursday while discussing the regulations that make information technology procurement so cumbersome.

“On my campaign, I could simply say, ‘Who are the best folks out there? – Let's get them around a table,” he said. “At the federal government level, you're going through, you know, 40 pages of specs and this and that and the other – and there’s all kinds of law involved … it's part of the reason why federal IT programs are chronically overbudget, behind schedule.”

Unfortunately, the president didn’t follow this reasoning where it logically goes, didn’t question the risk of having government oversee almost all aspects of the nation’s health insurance. The reason he didn’t is his abiding belief in government.

Such faith is more akin to religious tenet that a management theory. It’s reminiscent of George W. Bush’s core beliefs about Iraq, which ranged from his conviction that its dictator was stockpiling WMD to his certitude that merely tasting freedom would motivate Iraqis to unite under the banner of democracy.

Barack Obama said what he did about his health care law because somebody handed him those talking points, and he dutifully delivered them. He did so for the same reason Bush did, because he wanted it to be true. Bush and Obama’s optimism is an attractive trait, but their failures demonstrate the drawback of a faith-based presidency.